A Very Deceiving Night: Seeing the inversion

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Important confirmation that there was indeed a strong thermal inversion at Titanic’s wreck site comes from First Class passenger Philipp Edmund Mock who observed the same thing happening to the smoke from the sinking liner, which he observed from Lifeboat Number 11:

“We were probably a mile away when the Titanic’s lights went out.  I last saw the ship with her stern high in the air going down.  After the noise I saw a huge column of black smoke slightly lighter than the sky rising high into the sky and then flattening out at the top like a mushroom.”

Similarly, First Class passenger Colonel Archibald Gracie noticed how a pall of smoke hung in the stratified air above Titanic’s wreckage, as he rose to the surface following being sucked under by the sinking Titanic:

 “What impressed me at the time that my eyes beheld the horrible scene was a thin light-grey smoky vapor that hung like a pall a few feet above the broad expanse of sea that was covered with a mass of tangled wreckage. That it was a tangible vapor, and not a product of imagination, I feel assured. It may have been caused by smoke or steam rising to the surface around the area where the ship had sunk. At any rate it produced a supernatural effect, and the pictures I had seen by Dante and the description I had read in my Virgil of the infernal regions, of Charon, and the River Lethe, were then upper-most in my thoughts.”

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Colonel Archibald Gracie © St Paul’s School

This is all evidence of the heavily stratified air at Titanic’s wreck site, with cold, dense air near the sea and much warmer, less dense air higher up.  It’s also probable that the flat-topped smoke observed by Philipp Mock would have been trapped at the top of the cold band of refracting air, as is the smoke from the chimney below, photographed in miraging conditions, but where there was more wind than on the night the Titanic sank.  Nevertheless, it shows how warm smoke will be trapped below a cold, miraging band:

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Smoke trapped in an inverting layer, photograph by Pekka Parviainen



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